AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS FOR UNDERWATER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS (UWSNS) IN IOT: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are critical enablers of IoT-based aquatic monitoring, supporting marine ecology, offshore industry, disaster prevention, and defense applications. The hostile underwater channel — characterized by acoustic propagation, high attenuation, limited bandwidth, significant propagation delays, and stringent energy constraints — renders conventional terrestrial authentication schemes inadequate. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) synthesizes 85 primary studies (2020–2024) on UWSN authentication within IoT contexts, structured around three formal research questions addressing performance metrics, integration challenges, and security enhancement strategies. Six authentication paradigms are identified and critically evaluated: trust-based models, depth-control energy-efficient schemes, angle-of-arrival (AoA) physical-layer authentication, time-reversal (TR) channel-based schemes, blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving frameworks, and symmetric-key cryptography approaches. A novel Provenance-Based Authentication for UWSNs (PBAU) model is introduced and benchmarked against three state-of-the-art schemes: RBEER, EERMC, and BEKMP. Comparative simulation results confirm PBAU outperforms all benchmarks in energy efficiency, node longevity, authentication accuracy (>91%), and malicious-node detection rate (>92%). Critical research gaps and future directions including AI-adaptive authentication, post-quantum cryptography, and AUV-assisted trust bootstrapping are identified.